Antique Texas Longhorn Smokers Cigar Band 🤠 NOS 1910s–1930s Tobacciana Western Americana Paper Ephemera

Who Smoked a Texas Longhorn? 🤠 Antique Texas Longhorn Smokers Cigar Band

Size: 2 3/4" x 3/4"

TEXAS LONGHORN in red Western lettering, a big spread of longhorn horns underneath, and SMOKERS below that - all on a bright orange-yellow band. That's it, and that's plenty. Never used.

🐂 Smokers and Crooks

I've never found who made Texas Longhorn cigars - no maker or town is printed on the band, and the brand doesn't turn up in the Texas records I've been through. But it wasn't a one-off. The same longhorn band also came printed CROOKS instead of SMOKERS, and crooks were the bent, crooked little cigars a lot of men liked back then. So it looks like Texas Longhorn was a cigar line with at least two kinds under it.

🏜️ Why a Longhorn Sells a Cigar

Nothing said Texas faster than a longhorn. Texas ephemera hunters like to say brands like this were made for travelers riding the Gulf Coast rail line between New Orleans and the Southwest, who wanted to take home something that said Texas without any explaining. I can't prove it, but it sure fits this band.

🎩 Cigar Bands

Cigar historians credit Gustave Bock, who sold cigars out of Havana in the 1800s, with the first printed bands, and the old story is they were there to keep a gentleman's gloves clean. Collecting them is called vitolphilia.

It's a hobby that held on better in Europe than here. When Cigar Aficionado checked in on it in the mid-1990s, band clubs were going strong in Spain, France and Belgium, while Myron Freedman, who ran the International Label, Seal and Cigar Band Society for some thirty years, said band collecting in America was close to dead. But the biggest collection on record was an American's. Joe Hruby of Cleveland, born in 1912, started fishing cigar bands out of the street gutters in the early 1920s - right in this band's era - when a local pharmacy offered a prize to whoever could collect the most. Guinness put him in the record book in 1988 for the largest cigar band collection, more than 165,000 different bands, and by the time he died in 2005 he had over 200,000 of them, some going back to 1895. And he never smoked a cigar.

A fun one for a Texas or Western collection, a cigar band album, or a ranch-house frame. You'll get one like the one shown. The supply is finite - nobody's embossing Texas Longhorn bands again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.